Lent 2019: Tuesday, March 5 - What Was Finished?

When Jesus died on the cross, the Gospel of John tells us that he said, "It is finished."  Here is the quote in larger context:

"Later, knowing that everything had now been finished, and so that Scripture would be fulfilled, Jesus said, "I am thirsty."  A jar of wine vinegar was there, so they soaked a sponge in it, put the sponge on a stalk of the hyssop plant, and lifted it to Jesus' lips.  When he had received the drink, Jesus said, "It is finished."  With that, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit." (John 19:28-30)

When Jesus died, and he said "it was finished," what was he referring to?  Personally, as Christians, we sense that Christ has taken away sin, death, and hell.  We read of it in Scripture.  We have grace, new life, forgiveness of sin, fulfillment of promises, and assurance of salvation.  Yet, while these may be included in Jesus' "it", is this all we could find?  Have we canvassed the whole terrain?

At stake here is the question of how the world can be changed.  Now maybe you've heard - you can change the world!  Or maybe you've heard that you can't.  Still, to live today seems to include a yearning to change the world, and to have a sense that we should want to.  If the world has let us down, where do we get this yearning for a different sort of world?  What do we do with that yearning?  If Jesus finished something, why doesn't the finished product look more like the redeemed world we'd (perhaps) like to see?  Is Jesus' completed work for a few scattered individuals, or is there something in it for the world in general?

P.T. Forsyth writes about this hope:

"The gift and grace of God for the whole world is there.  It is not simply nor chiefly the love of Christ for his brethren that is in the Cross.  That was indeed uppermost in Christ's life; but in his death that is not direct but indirect; and the primary thing is Christ's obedience to God, and his action, therefore, as the channel of God's redeeming love.  It is the love of God for the godless, loveless, hating world that is there.  And it is there, not simply expressed but effected, not exhibited but enforced and infused, not in manifestation merely, but in judgment and decision...The prince of this world is already judged.  He acts today as a power, indeed, but only as a doomed power.  His sentence went out in the Cross.  And he knows it.  Humanity was rescued from him there.  The crisis of man's spiritual destiny is there.  The opus operatum of history is there.  It is not simply revelation, but revelation as redemption.  It does not show, it does." (The Cure of Souls, 40-41)

Forsyth's bold claim that humanity was rescued at the cross is grounded in what we know of the event.  Christ did not only die for his disciples.  Christ died for those who put him to death.  He died for the "godless, loveless, hating world."  Paul extrapolates from that to say that this is how we know he has saved us: "While we were still sinners, Christ died for us." (Rom. 5:8)  I can only sense that Chris Konker is loved by Christ as I have an understanding for what Christ did for an entire rebellious world on the cross.  My own individual salvation is best understood within the larger story of what God has done for all of creation in Jesus Christ.

This blog series will explore that question of what Christ has done for the world.  We will wrestle with the topics of weighty words like atonement and justification.  The payoff from this will be an increased sense of what God has already done for you, me, and the world that nothing can take away.  We have every reason to expect a lot here.  As Paul writes, "And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord's holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge - that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God." (Ephesians 3:18).

Lent seems a great time to explore this in a condensed way.  The 40 days of Lent have historically been a time for the church to look again at what it means to answer Christ's invitation to take up our cross and follow him.  The Bible is our chief guide, but we'll also have two theologian companions: Peter Leithart and Fleming Rutledge.  Both wrote mammoth books about the crucifixion three to four years ago.  This blog series will allow me an opportunity to work through their books some more.  Leithart's book Delivered from the Elements of the World seeks to chart an understanding of Christ's death that is deeply attentive to levitical sacrifices.  Fleming Rutledge's The Crucifixion is a deep dive into seven biblical motifs for understanding Christ's crucifixion.  Although her book is several hundred pages longer than Leithart's, Rutledge's book is easier to read.  That said, it is Leithart's presentation that will be way more influential on this blog.  My headings for the 40 days mirror the layout of Leithart's book.

I'm humbled as I begin this, not because I expect much from my endeavors, but because I know I'll fall short.  I have not read any book that has quite seemed to do justice to all I feel about the cross, to the point that it has seemed to me better to sit and ponder the cross itself rather than to chart guesses as to what it means.  I still feel that way.  My prayer is that these Lenten reflections will motivate us to sit in silence in front of the cross more often.  And I also pray that you would join me in answering the question, "what was finished?" with a resounding answer of, "A LOT!"

Un-Screening - Post 3

My favorite line of Iron Man 2 was when Pepper Potts and Tony Stark are on an airplane.  There is a smoldering guilt, under which Tony persists the whole movie about how awful he’s making Pepper’s life.  On the plane, he tries to distract from the gathering relational, corporate, and psychological chaos by suggesting a vacation.  “Everyone needs to recharge their batteries.”  But Pepper takes him literally.  “No, Tony, I don’t run on batteries.”  Tony has become the machine man.

Can technology save the world?  By wedding ourselves to technology, will we progress as a human race?  Will we be at peace?

These superhero movies are violent in a way that makes me wonder if the violence is inherent, latently present in our technology, or at least our visions of technology.  Charlie’s games with cars are always more violent than his games with faced, and presumably en-souled figurines.  Playing with cars, there are few alternatives to banging them into each other.

When I read Bruce Springsteen’s memoir, he made much of a charmingly flawed math equation.  To his way of thinking, one and one can equal three and this happens when band members make a sound or a moment greater than the sum of their parts.  For Springsteen, this is rock n’ roll.  If we think of humanity again, faced people, ensouled people (there are no other kinds!), we find that they have parts, they are complex, but not complex the way a machine is.  There is a depth to every person.  We describe all things in a way that they transcend the sum of their parts.  It strikes me that this is why we struggle to articulate this depth.  We use the language of religion and symbol.

I reminded a neighbor of this.  Yes, I’m a pastor.  But when I ask if you are religious, I’m not asking your opinion of doctrine.  I want to know if you know how deep we all are.  Everybody knows that a face is not just the sum of its parts.  Everybody.  We are all more religious than we let on.  No matter how many technological fireworks distract me from it, I’m thankful for Pepper Potts’ little line: “No, Tony, I don’t run on batteries.”

I was with a friend today and asked him if he was going to talk to somebody about prayer, how would he talk about it.  Ultimately, he wasn’t sure.  And I felt that was a good answer!  Religion has to do with the depths inside each human person.  It has to do with many things: memories, Scripture, spouses and children, mothers and fathers, tradition, bad desires, good desires, images, symbols.  Compared with how these things strike us in prayer, we often find words to be inadequate tools to get these things across!  We are more than the sum of our parts.  We are more than machines.  We don’t run on batteries.

Un-Screening - Post 2

The sky and sea seemed to meet.  For Hank, it’s as though they were one element again.  The boat was calling to him.  The fish were calling to him.  He went inside and picked up the phone.  It was time to get all the guys together.  It was time to go fishing.  Nobody admitted how much trouble it was to set the date.  One couldn’t find a pen to write it down.  Another was in the car at the time the text came through.  Everyone had problems like these.

Once he’d grabbed four neighbors, Hank was able to get the boat tipped over, as green, brackish water came gushing out onto the dirt.  He sat, and tried to resist eating the entire bag of Kettle chips.  Stray cats walked by.  Storm clouds lingered to the north, and he tried to delete old pictures off his phone.  He saw a picture of his dad.  He swiped faster than he had been.

Despite the fact that each man had their heart set on fishing, each man also discovered how much he had regretted agreeing to go.  There were moments that day that they hated themselves for going.  It’s bad manners to get into their lives too much.  But each of them found themselves sitting at a table, sighing, holding their head in their hands.  The only thing that kept them going was that spark of anticipation that they might get a little nibble on the line, and the other men would roar, “Cheers!

Hank had sat the night before looking out at the deep, dark sea.  What was it like to be dead?  To be part of that incredible stillness?  He missed his dad’s strength, and appetite for life.  His dad could whistle through his teeth like nobody’s business.  Hank almost thought he could hear it on the sea breeze.  He almost felt like he’d been punched in the gut.

He prayed a most helpless prayer.  Like he imagined some wounded dog might do, he howled on the inside, with low moans emitting.  The room felt really cramped.  He pictured all the people he loved, waiting to talk to him.  He got up to wash his hands and face.  He stared at a bowl of split pea soup, drowned in goldfish crackers, but he didn’t eat.  He made a vow not to eat until he was eating a fish he himself would catch.  Not in the habit of doing things like this, he struggled.  He lay in bed with his stomach growling.  He dreamt of mugs of beer. 

He sat on the beach the next day with only four other people around.  He went out into the surf with the water up to his neck, lapping at his chin.  He floated, light as can be, the sky like a great bowl above him pouring blue goodness into his eyes.  The salty smell of the sea filled him with such hunger.  Later, he would sit, waiting at the dock with his father’s empty boat.

After many fish had been caught, Hank sat among his friends, showing them the picture of his father when he’d been caught in the rain, his face all squinched up.  The grill hadn’t been lit yet.  Nor had they docked the boat.  But they could smell it already.  And they could already taste it too. 

Un-Screening - Post 1

In 2019, I want to write about ‘un-screening’ my life.

First, this is not literally true.  I’m typing this and reading it on a screen.  That reflects some of the ambiguity of screens and technology.  My tone takes for granted both the inevitability of technology – that it is so pervasive that it takes on a world-building sort of omnipresence.  It is the world as we find it.  My son picks up screen technology just as easily as he picks up an apple.  As such, I don’t really ‘have it in for’ technology.  I’m not really interested to score points against it.  I don’t foresee a world without it.  That said, my tone will also reflect a deeply pessimistic account of screen technology, not for what it is in itself, but what we become when we have it.  I don’t think it is a good thing.

Second, this will be a personal reflection.  My own dependence on screens over the course of 2018 seemed morally dubious to me at best.  It certainly wasn’t morally neutral.  I anticipate this writing project will help me to keep something like a year-long Lenten discipline of narrowing the margin between my consciousness and screen usage.  It’s a little too easy to pull out the smart phone.  My mind has been bypassed.  My thumb knows too well what it is doing as it accesses my favorite guilty pleasures, care-free zones, laugh echo-chambers, life escapes.  I have hopes for what I will be doing or thinking about instead of being on screens.  As such, I think an important part of this will be what becomes possible to think or do once screen technology becomes thoughtfully marginalized.

Third, I find screens to be theologically interesting.  ‘Mediation’ is a one-word summary for how interesting these topics are.  Mediation describes representation of content – the baseball game on the radio, the football game or news show on the TV, the space exhibit at the museum.  You know, media.  Want to experience something new, something exciting?  Most of the time, it isn’t direct.  It is mediated by something, and often it is through a screen.  Mediation also describes the work of Jesus Christ.  He represents God to humanity and represents humanity to God.  Much of religious experience seems to come down to questions of access or alienation, being on the inside of temples and holy places or on the outside of them.  What kind of access do we have to God?  What kind of access do we have to the shows we watch?  Screens feel accessible.  But are they?  Do they keep us out of something just as much if not more than they let us in on something?

Again, if screens lose some of their power, this might free us up for a re-introduction to creation.  To trees.  To fairy tales.  To books.  To food.  To drink.  To sleep.  This would be a good thing.

Revelation

This is the summary outline of the Book of Revelation from James Jordan:

a   Prelude to the Seven Churches, ch. 1
     b   The Seven Churches, ch. 2-3
           c   Prelude to the Sealed Book, ch. 4-5
                d   The Sealed Book, ch. 6-7
                d'  The Trumpets, ch. 8-12
           c'  Postlude to the Trumpets, ch. 13-15
     b'  The Bowls, ch. 16
a'  Postlude to the Bowls, ch. 17-22

This structure suggests the centrality of the four sections of seven: seven churches (b), seven seals (d), seven trumpets (d'), and seven bowls (b').  Preludes to the sections on the seven churches and seven seals are matched by postludes to the sections on the seven trumpets and seven bowls.

The 'a' pattern links the prelude to the seven churches to the postlude to the seven bowls.  In both sections, we see John and Jesus, we consider Jesus as the First and the Last, his manifestation to all creation, repentant and unrepentant alike, and we consider the importance of John's writing.

The 'b' pattern links the seven churches to the seven bowls.  The seven churches are warned about the coming of God's wrath.  The seven bowls show the coming of God's wrath.

The 'c' pattern links the prelude to the seven seals to the postlude to the seven trumpets.  In the first section, a scene of righteous worship in heaven leads up to the opening of the seals.  In the second section, as a result of the dragon being hurled down, a scene of unrighteous worship on earth leads up to the pouring of the bowls of wrath.

The 'd' pattern is central, linking the opening of the seven seals to the seven angels blowing seven trumpets.  The seals open the book.  The trumpets are the proclamation of the contents of the book.

Jude

This is the twenty-first in a series of twenty-one summaries of the New Testament letters.  The twenty-first is Jude, and the outline comes from John Paul Heil:

a   May the Mercy and Love of God Be Multiplied to You, 1-4
     b   Some are Kept Under Gloom for Judgment, 5-11
     b'  Judgment of the Ungodly for Whom the Gloom Has Been Kept, 12-20
a'  Keep Yourselves in the Love of God Awaiting the Mercy of Our Lord, 21-25

The 'a' pattern links Jude's early call to contend for the faith with the later call to keep themselves in God's love.  Early on, Jude writes: "I felt compelled to write and urge you to contend for the faith that was entrusted to God's holy people." (3)  In the second section, Jude tells the believers to "keep yourselves in God's love as you wait for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to bring you to eternal life." (21)

The 'b' pattern is linked by themes of darkness and judgment.  In the first section, Jude writes of angels who "did not keep their positions of authority but abandoned their proper dwelling - these he has kept in darkness, bound with everlasting chains for judgment on the great Day." (6)  In the second section, Jude writes of the ungodly people, that they are "wild waves of the sea, foaming up their shame; wandering stars, for whom blackest darkness has been reserved forever." (13)

3 John

This is the twentieth in a series of twenty-one summaries of the New Testament letters.  The twentieth is 3 John, and the outline comes from Peter Leithart:

a   Greeting to Gaius, 1
     b   Beloved, gladness in witness, 2-4
          c   Beloved, faithfulness to strangers, 5-8
               d   Diotrephes loves to be first, 9-10
          c'  Beloved, do what is good, 11
     b'  Demetrius has a good witness, 12
a'  Greeting to friends by name, 13-14

The 'a' pattern links introductory and concluding greetings.

The 'b' pattern is linked by testimony.  In the first section, John hears from believers testifying about Gaius' faithfulness to the truth. (3)  In the second section, the good testimony about Demetrius is proclaimed to be true. (12)

The 'c' pattern links two sections about doing good.  In the first section, Gaius is commended for his faithfulness to strangers.  In the second section, Gaius is exhorted to imitate what is good.

The 'd' section is central, emphasizing Diotrephes' selfishness and lack of hospitality.